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Secondary, Career, and Technical Education
Adult Education and Literacy
Community Colleges
News from Around the U.S. Department of Education

Secondary, Career, and Technical Education

Guidance Issued to States to Revise Perkins State Plans

Under the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act of 1998, eligible agencies seeking grant funds in 1999 submitted five-year plans describing how the Perkins funds would be used to enhance and improve vocational and technical education programs in their states. Last year, in the absence of new legislation, the General Education Provisions Act (GEPA) automatically extended the law for an additional year, and OVAE approved state plan extensions and revisions, including adjusted performance levels for program year six, beginning on July 1, 2004.

Instead of acting to reauthorize Perkins III this year, Congress continued funding for Perkins III in the FY 2005 appropriations act [Public Law 108-447, signed on December 8, 2004]. Funds for use in program year seven will become available to states on an advance-funded basis, beginning on July 1, 2005. However, OVAE has extended state plans and approved adjusted performance levels only through June 30, 2004.

On January 14, 2005, Assistant Secretary Susan Sclafani issued detailed guidance to the State Directors of Vocational and Technical Education for extending their state plans for year seven. The guidance memo requires states to submit the following: a letter requesting to extend the current state plan, revisions to their state plan (if any), a new budget for the seventh year of funding, and proposed performance levels for the program year beginning July 1, 2005, which each state must successfully negotiate with OVAE staff.

In order to ensure timely receipt of the new grant awards, these items must be received in OVAE by April 15, 2005. Submissions may be e-mailed to Perkins2005@ed.gov, or faxed to (202) 245-7170, followed by a signed, hard copy via mail.

Please contact Maurice James, Chief of the State Administration Branch, at (202) 245-7781 or your Perkins state liaison if you have any questions.

New Report Released from Achieve

Achieve, Inc. has released a new report examining high school graduation requirements across the nation. The Expectations Gap: A 50-State Review of High School Graduation Requirements takes a look at state graduation requirements across the 50 states and the District of Columbia and specifically the math and English course-taking requirements for earning a diploma in each state. Their findings include the following:

• "No state requires its graduates to take the courses that reflect the real-world demands of work and postsecondary education." Achieve argues that, in order to be adequately prepared, every student should take four years of "rigorous math," including Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II, data analysis and statistics, and four years of "grade-level" English, with content including literature, writing, reasoning, logic, and communication skills.
• "Only Arkansas, Indiana and Texas have made or will soon make a college-preparatory curriculum the norm." In math, only five states - AL, AR, MI, SC, and WV - require all students to complete four math courses for graduation. Of the 44 states that do require some math courses be taken, 22 do not specify which math courses students should take. In English, only six states - AL, AR, KY, NC, TX, and WV - require four years of "grade-level" English.

Using these findings, Achieve makes the following recommendations:

• All students should be required to take a common college- and work-preparatory curriculum in math and English;
• State standards must specify what level of rigor and content should be expected of required courses, rather than focus solely on course titles;
• Align academic standards in high school with the knowledge and skills required for college and workplace success;
• Encourage high school students to go beyond required courses to pursue opportunities to earn postsecondary credit while in high school;
• States should determine what content is essential, and then give local educators flexibility in determining approaches for teaching that content; and
• Monitor student achievement from kindergarten through postsecondary education.

On the Web: http://www.achieve.org/

Setting high expectations for all high school students and encouraging students to take a rigorous core curriculum to match those expectations are critical components of the U.S. Department of Education's "Preparing America's Future: High School Initiative.

On the web: http://www.ed.gov/highschool


OVAE State Administration and Accountability Group to Host Meetings

The OVAE State Administration and Accountability Group will be hosting three meetings to provide current legislative information and technical assistance in such areas as financial management and data analysis for state officials who administer Perkins grants. The meetings will be held in the spring and summer of 2005.

National Spring Leadership Meeting (April 11-13, 2005)

The National Spring Leadership Meeting will be co-hosted by the National Association of State Directors of Career Technical Education Consortium (NASDCTEc) and OVAE and will be held at the Hilton Washington Hotel, 1919 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington D.C. The purpose of this conference is to provide necessary information on legislation, research, and emerging issues important to career and technical education. There are networking and sharing opportunities, updates on legislation related to workforce development and education reform, and much more.

For more information, please contact Meghan Pauliny at (202) 737-0303 or mpauliny@careertech.org; Maury James at (202) 245-7781 or maurice.james@ed.gov; or Kim Green at (202) 737-0303 or kgreen@careertech.org. Registration information and a draft agenda are available at http://www.careertech.org.

Financial Management Institute (April 13-15, 2005)

OVAE will hold the Financial Management Institute immediately following the National Spring Leadership Meeting, beginning at noon on April 13, also at the Hilton Washington Hotel in Washington, D.C. This event continues the department's tradition of offering financial management training for state financial and audit resolution staff who work on issues in vocational and adult education (Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Adult Education Act (Perkins III) and Adult Education and Family Literacy Act (AEFLA), respectively).

Among the proposed agenda topics are: Innovative Uses of Funds, Combined Funds, Financial Reporting, Grants Administration and Payment System (GAPS), GAPS Draw-downs and Carry-over Funds, Maintenance of Effort/Matching/Supplanting, Time Distribution, Indirect Cost Issues, Audit Process, Education Department's Central Automated Processing System (EDCAPS), Cash Management Improvement Act of 1990 (CMIA), and updates on any new legislation.

For more information, contact Nancy Brooks, at (202) 245-7774 or nancy.brooks@ed.gov, and Carroll Towey, at (202) 245-7830 or carroll.towey@ed.gov.

Data Quality Institute (DQI) (June 14-16, 2005)

This conference, originally set for April 2005 in Washington, D.C., has been rescheduled for June 14-16, 2005, in Phoenix, Arizona, immediately following the National Association of State Directors of Career Technical Education Consortium's Career Clusters Institute. To the extent possible, participants of the DQI are invited to attend the Career Clusters Institute. (More information about the Career Clusters Institute can be found at http://www.careertech.org.)

Begun in 2001, the DQI aims to improve the quality and consistency of data collected by the states. OVAE has worked with the states in past years to improve the selection and implementation of measurement approaches and data collection systems. This year's focus will be to move from quality data collection to the application and use of data for program improvement.

Online registration will begin shortly. Meanwhile, the draft agenda may be accessed at http://www.edcountability.net. You may direct questions to John Haigh at (202) 245-7735 or john.haigh@ed.gov.


New Data Set Available to Support High School Achievement Gap Research

The U.S. Department of Education's Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE) is pleased to announce the availability of a new data set that will enable researchers to conduct state-by-state longitudinal analyses of achievement gap issues in high schools.

The data were collected as part of an analysis, commissioned by OVAE, to identify comprehensive high schools in which the achievement gap in reading and mathematics between minority and non-minority students had narrowed. The analysis examined historical assessment data from ten states-Arkansas, California, Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin-as well as from the District of Columbia. Each state reported results at the school level, disaggregated by race/ethnic group (i.e., these data are group, rather than individual student level results). Additional data, not included in the final study analyses, are available for Illinois, North Carolina, and South Dakota.

OVAE used the analysis to identify four comprehensive high schools that had significantly narrowed the achievement gap between the 1999-2000 and 2001-2002 school years and continued to demonstrate high levels of performance during subsequent school years. Administrators and faculty from these schools were invited to participate in a day-long meeting in December 2004 to discuss the policies and practices they were implementing to improve academic achievement by all of their students and particularly their minority students. OVAE will publish a report that summarizes the focus group proceedings later this year.

The high school assessment data collected for the OVAE analysis are now included as part of the National Longitudinal School-Level State Assessment Score Database (NLSLSASD). NLSLSASD is funded by the Department of Education to collect data from state testing programs and contains assessment scores for approximately 80,000 public schools in the U.S. The NLSLSASD Web site provides documentation for each state's data that specifies the name and type of assessments used; the types of measures available for each state (for example, scale scores or performance levels); the student groups for whom assessment information is available; and selected school-level measures taken from the Common Core of Data (CCD) that describe school and student characteristics.

Users of the high school data are strongly advised to read the State Profiles, available at http://208.253.216.16/assessment/profiles03.asp. The documentation provides essential information about the specific state assessments and any changes in state procedures that may affect analyses. Users of these data should be aware that the type of information varies by states. Some states, for example, provide the number of students tested as a percentage of students eligible to be tested, and in others these percentages are shown separately by race/ethnicity.

The NLSLSASD data are available in a variety of different formats, including SAS, SPSS, and comma separated (CSV) text format. All these materials can be found at http://208.253.216.16/assessment/default.asp. The high school data can be accessed by clicking on the "High School Data" tab on the left side of screen.

The high school data are likely to be helpful for researchers, state education officials, and local school and district administrators who are interested in exploring patterns of student achievement over time where individual level data are unavailable (some states do not release individual level test results because of state and federal privacy regulations). Since each state dataset includes theca institution identification code (and, for some states, the school's state identification code), other information about the school (e.g., the number of faculty, the percentage of credentialed teachers, teacher race/ethnicity, among other items) can be added to the high school data and incorporated into analyses.

New Design for the Career Voyages Web Site

In 2003, the U.S. Department of Labor, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Vocational and Adult Education, launched the Career Voyages Web site (www.careervoyages.gov) as a new tool to help the public to learn about high-growth industries and occupations and the skills that are needed to access them. While Career Voyages provides value to all Americans, it especially targets four groups: students, parents, career advisors, and career changers. The Web site offers short videos for most of the occupations listed, provides wage trends at the U.S. and state levels for these occupations, and makes available detailed information on the range of education and training options for individuals wishing to enter these occupations. Users can locate education and training resources in their area, whether it is an apprenticeship, a community college, a four-year university, or any of the many other options available.

In July 2004, in order to attract more students, the Web site was redesigned to improve the overall visual appeal while maintaining compliance with accessibility standards. Since the redesign, the number of the hits to the site has increased dramatically. Average monthly site hits prior to the re-launch were just over 1 million. Site hits are now 1.3 million per week on average. The amount of information provided has also been expanded. Occupational tables organized by industry now include the projected ten-year growth for employees, the wage range, and the education or training needed to qualify. Of particular interest to educators is the fact that the educational focus has been expanded to include information about career clusters, apprenticeships, four-year university degrees, the Job Corps, and career one-stop centers. The Web site has also added a GIS search function for locating education and training options needed to enter the high demand occupations.

Additional upgrades and enhancements are now being pursued. Web site developers are starting dialogues with high growth industry partnering organizations and America's Career Resource Network organizations in order to collaborate in the creation and acquisition of new content. The purpose of these contacts is to greatly increase the breadth and depth of the site's offerings, as well as extend access to and use of the site at the state and local level. Under development is an adaptation of the NYCareerZone.org "Assess Yourself" tool to create a Career Voyages "Compass." Using the six Holland RIASEC codes, the Compass will provide users with a simple-to-use guide to the high growth, in demand industries and occupations that might be right for them. Graphical displays of information throughout the site are also slated for improvement, especially those that display variations in occupational growth throughout the country.

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Adult Education and Literacy

Colleges "Break Through" To Help Low-Skilled Learners Succeed

Community colleges can play a larger role in preparing low-literate adults for college and family-supporting employment opportunities according to a recent report, Breaking Through: Helping Low-Skilled Adults Enter and Succeed in College and Careers. The report that was funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and produced by Jobs for the Future, in partnership with the National Council for Workforce Education, outlines a number of synergistic approaches showing community colleges have promise for helping larger numbers of low-skilled adults advance their educations in short periods of time. Strategies include:

• Integrating institutional structures and services,
• Accelerating learning,
• Linking academic skills to labor market payoffs, and
• Providing comprehensive support services such as case management.

The report points out that colleges that are already committed to innovation are best able to make sustainable progress and spur institution-wide change. College leaders and practitioners participating in the study recommended additional support for assisting "early adopter" colleges in promoting these strategies, peer learning opportunities by colleges receiving assistance to help other colleges implement models, national peer learning and awareness activities, strengthening college leadership through leadership academies, and support of state policies that advance programmatic and institutional changes benefiting low-income adults.

The Mott Foundation plans to invest significant funding in demonstration grants, developing model programs and services and holding peer-learning events, over the next several years. To view the report, go to http://www.ncwe.org


New Resources for Low Income Adult Students in Higher Education

A new Web site sponsored by the American Council on Education (ACE) and the Lumina Foundation offers a report and a searchable database on resources and programs for low-income adult college students. The Web site is part of the Improving Lives: Ensuring the Academic Success of Low-Income Adults initiative, which seeks to highlight the importance of these students, identify the challenges and successful strategies in educating them, and encourage institutional and policy leaders to improve the academic success of low-income adults.

Reports, resources, and activities include:

• A report, Low-Income Adults in Profile: Improving Lives Through Higher Education, providing background characteristics, academic profiles, and special challenges faced by low-income adult students, contrasting their situations with those of traditional students and other adults. The report features an essay on the economic and social imperative for investing in the education of low-income adults. A free download of the report is available through the Web site.
• An online resource of federal and state programs for low-income adults, searchable by 11 program types (e.g., financial aid, workforce investment, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and others) and by federal or state jurisdiction. ACE conducted a national audit of state and federal programs that assist low-income adults in their pursuit of education beyond high school. Entries for the more than 400 programs include program name, type, purpose, eligibility criteria/restrictions, amount of aid provided, number of individuals assisted, and contact information.
• Exemplar State Programs provides a description of four TANF programs (CA, HI, IA, and KY), two workforce investment programs (ME and WA), and three programs listed under financial aid (a Part-Time Grant program in IN, childcare in MN, and workforce improvement grant in AK).
• Exemplar Federal Programs outlines seven programs in the areas of financial aid and tax incentives, childcare, and student support services

Upcoming activities include:

• A final report based on a national survey of all regionally accredited, degree-granting institutions and case studies of exemplary institutions. Scheduled for release in spring 2005, the report will identify the institutional policies, programs, and practices that help low-income adults meet their academic goals as well as those that act as barriers.
• Meetings for teams of state policy makers and institution leaders to craft action plans that address the needs of low-income adult students. The Web site includes a contact number for college presidents interested in organizing a state team.

For more information about other programs, practices, and policies that successfully facilitate transitions from adult basic education to community college certificate and degree programs, visit the Office of Vocational and Adult Education's Adult Education to Community College Transitions Project

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Community Colleges

Improving Student Attainment in Community Colleges Analyzed in new Report

A new report, Improving Student Attainment in Community Colleges: Institutional Characteristics and Policies, analyzes existing research on student degree completion and offers models to benchmark the performance of community colleges. The report synthesizes findings on several of the factors that have been found to impact higher education graduation rates, summarizes research on the effects of college programs on student persistence and completion, and suggests models for predicting graduation rates for community colleges with varying student or institutional characteristics.

The report was published by the Community College Research Center (CCRC) and conducted as part of the Lumina Foundation's initiative, Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count. The initiative will initially work with 27 community colleges in five states to help them increase retention, completion, and success for low-income students, students of color, first-generation college students, and other underserved groups.

Overall, the publication provides:

• A general descriptive information about characteristics and educational outcomes of community college students, comparing them with other higher education students. (Characteristics include full-time versus part-time attendance, family income, parental educational attainment levels, stopping-out, and ethnicity/race.);
• A discussion of the use of college completion and transfer rates as an evaluation standard for community colleges;
• A review of research on student outcomes in community colleges to indicate promising strategies for improving student outcomes and to suggest how to improve the quality and effectiveness of research on student outcomes; and
• A suggested benchmarking system for evaluating college performance that considers differences in college characteristics when analyzing community college graduation rates. CCRC developed and applied models predicting graduation rates to community colleges listed in the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Researchers also compared the actual rates reported as part of the IPEDS Graduation Rate Survey to the predicted rates from the model.

The report holds that colleges whose actual completion rates are higher than their predicated rates do better than expected in enabling students to complete degrees, while colleges whose actual rates are lower than their predicted completion rates do not graduate students at a rate that would be expected, given the mix of students they serve, the financial resources available to them, and other factors. They identify "high performers" and "low performers" based on their actual versus predicted outcomes.

The authors also offer recommendations on further research and development of models that specifically address community colleges when examining student retention, graduation, and transfer rates.

The role that community colleges play in their communities is a central focus at OVAE. The Community College Website includes resources for community colleges as well as a description of initiatives that highlight or promote their role.

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News from Around the U.S. Department of Education

Margaret Spellings Confirmed to be the Eighth U.S. Secretary of Education

On January 20, just hours after the President took his oath of office for a second term, the U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed Margaret Spellings as the eighth U.S. Secretary of Education. Below are excerpts from her first message to department staff.

"As I indicated in my confirmation hearing, there is no more critical obligation each of us has to the American people than to educate our citizens. In our diverse country, we share the belief that education is the great equalizer. It is the key to success for individual Americans and the key to success of our nation -- not just economic success but civic and democratic success. In our country, we believe that a great education must be available to each and every American."

"Our schools are, right now, preparing the individuals who will succeed each of us.... I have been involved in our public schools for more than two decades in many different ways. I am a parent of school-aged children. I have worked in both legislative and executive branches of government, as well as at the local, state, and federal levels. We have a lot of work ahead of us, work that will affect our nation's future in a most fundamental way."

Before coming to the U.S. Department of Education, Spellings served as Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, where she was responsible for the development and implementation of policy on education, health, housing, justice, labor, transportation, and other elements of President Bush's domestic agenda. Prior to her White House appointment, she worked for six years as Governor Bush's Senior Advisor, with responsibility for developing and implementing education policy. Her state work included the Texas Reading Initiative, the Student Success Initiative to eliminate social promotion, and one of the nation's strongest school assessment and accountability systems.

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